Kovel, capitalism is "happy to enlist" the Green movement for "convenience", "control over popular dissent", and "rationalization", and further attacked within-system green initiatives like carbon trading, which he saw as a "capitalist shell game" that turns pollution "into a fresh source of profit". Kovel criticized the "defeatism" of voluntarism in some local forms of environmentalism that do not connect. He suggested that they can be "drawn off into individualism" or co-opted to the demands of capitalism, as in the case of certain recycling projects, where citizens are "induced to provide free labor" to waste management industries who are involved in the "capitalization of nature". He labelled the notion of voluntarism "ecopolitics without struggle". Kovel wrote that "events in nature are reciprocal and multi-determined" and can not be predictably "fixed"; socially, technologies cannot solve social problems because they are not "mechanical". He posits an analysis, developed from Marx, that patterns of production and social organisation are more important than the forms of technology used within a given configuration of society. Under capitalism, he suggested that technology "has been the sine qua non of growth", believing that even in a world with hypothetical "free energy" the effect would be to lower the cost of automobile production, leading to the massive overproduction of vehicles, "collapsing infrastructure", chronic resource depletion, and the "paving over" of the "remainder of nature". In the modern world, Kovel considered the supposed efficiency of new post-industrial commodities is a "plain illusion", as miniaturized components involve many substances and are non-recyclable, and theoretically only simple substances could be retrieved by burning out-of-date equipment, releasing more pollutants. He warned "environmental liberals" against over-selling the virtues of renewable energies that cannot meet the mass energy consumption of the era; although he would still support renewable energy projects, he believed it is more important to restructure societies to reduce energy use before relying on renewable energy technologies alone. Critique of green economics Kovel thought that eco-socialists must reject at a fundamental level what he called "ecological economics" or the "ecological wing of mainstream economics" for being "uninterested in social transformation". He further rejected the neo-Smithian school, who believe in Adam Smith's vision of "a capitalism of small producers, freely exchanging with each other", which is self-regulating and competitive. The school is represented by thinkers like David Korten who believe in "regulated markets" checked by government and civil society; for Kovel, they do not